1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a vehicular electronic control apparatus that controls powertrain units, such as an engine and a transmission, and a method for controlling vehicle using the vehicular electronic control apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Vehicular electronic control apparatuses (hereinafter referred to as “ECU”) exchange signals with a vehicular control mechanism to perform electronic control on a vehicle, and implements a desired control with one ECU, such as a powertrain ECU and a brake control ECU.
A vehicle is equipped with a large number of electronic control apparatuses such as an economy running ECU that controls automatic stop/restart of an engine when predetermined conditions are satisfied, a body ECU that controls lamps, doors, etc., an airbag ECU, and a security ECU, as well as the above-described powertrain ECU and brake control ECU. The respective ECUs individually and independently control objects to be controlled, but they are often required to exchange information with other ECUs.
Therefore, in order to perform various kinds of control with correlating a plurality of ECUs mounted on a vehicle with each other, while the plurality of ECUs are connected to a common path line, mutual communication control is performed using a controller area network (hereinafter referred to as “CAN”) protocol that is a typical standard network protocol (for example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,586,118; 5,659,702; 5,696,904; and 5,764,919).